Permaculture in Ethiopia: A Call to Participate!

Permaculture in Ethiopia stands
on the edge of a sea of possibilities. This is a virgin land. The mighty plains
of Abyssinia rise out of the Eastern Sahara, to become rolling fertile uplands,
worked by farmers in the primeval mode that the modern westerner can only dream
about nowadays, caricatured by the Shire in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. It is
a land where people live in little circular grass-roofed huts and make hay
stacks with wooden pitch forks to feed their cattle through the dry season.
They plough the deep fertile soils with oxen and sow a variety of crops, of
which their most beloved is their own indigenous endemic grain t’eff, used to
make the national staple food, injera.

Ethiopia is not a desert, though
parts of its territory are, such as the Danakil, a boiling cauldron of
volcanism and sulphur in the Northern rift valley, one of the lowest and
hottest places on earth, populated by the Afars, a warrior tribe, pastoralists,
beloved of their camels and as harsh as the landscape they occupy. Most of the
country though is fertile highland. In areas over 2000m, which is where at
least 75% of the population are found, the annual rainfall is usually over
1000mm, often a lot over 1000mm, though there is a trend of increasing lushness
as one moves south through the country.

Ethiopia is infamous as a land of
famine and poverty. And indeed life is tough for much of the 80% rural
population. The nation has remained one of the most isolated cultures on earth,
even up to today and though the system of governance has changed its stripes,
little has changed up to this day in terms allowing external influences. This
was only part of Africa that was never colonised. Of course that is a reason
for pride, but it also means there has been very little technology introduced
or infrastructure built, and the levels of education are very poor compared to
East African countries like Kenya or Uganda where the British enforced
standards and built schools. The result is that the literacy rate in Ethiopia
is among the lowest in Africa. Most people work the land by hand for what they
eat, and when that fails they are reliant on aid.

Systems of land management here
are archaic. While it may seem that non-mechanised and organic agriculture
would lead to sustainability, there are several reasons why Ethiopia, like
other ancient agrarian cultures, has been slowly corroding the foundations of
its own sustenance. It seems to be precisely because it is a land endowed with
such natural wealth that the people have never really been forced to think
about how to implement careful stewardship. The plough is the basis of their
agriculture. Grain and meat are the major products. Mono-cropping, overstocking
and unregulated grazing are the norms and are creating major land degradation.
Deforestation and failure to plant new trees except for stands of Eucalyptus,
which fail to protect soil and in-fact wreck the land by killing the
groundcover around them, while draining the water table, are other major
problems. To make matters worse, these days, the agro-tech industry has moved
into business with the agricultural extension offices, trying by hook and by
crook, to push hybrid seeds and the chemicals of high-input industrial
agriculture onto the peasant sector, just like they do in much of Africa. All
of this has left a growing rural population on steadily degrading (though
still, for the most part, very good quality) land without the tools it needs to
produce consistently for its own needs in an increasingly chaotic global
climate, now falling into the cycle of debt-dependence to the agro-tech
multinationals.

And yet, the crazy thing is that
Ethiopia has the potential to feed not just itself, but most of the Middle east
and North Africa too, so well endowed is it with ample rainfall, deep rich
volcanic soils and a wide variety of agro-climates that allow it to produce
fruit ranging from apples to mangoes and a spectrum of grains ranging from
barley to millet with a great variety of indigenous strains of each in between.
This was what struck me when I came across Ethiopia in 2005 when I was
wondering around the world looking for a place put down Permacultural roots and
do something with my life.

Back in those days i was just a
naive middle-class western-white-liberal backpacker, thinking that all I had to
do was rock up, buy some land and begin planting trees on it and I’d inspire
the whole country to do the same. Five years down the line a lot has happened,
but it wasn’t really how I imagined it. I turned up with a backpack full of
clothes and (a photo copy of) the designer’s manual under my arm. I had £15
thousand in the bank back home and not much of a clue at all what i was up to.
I’d done a PDC the previous month near Barcelona with an American trainer
called Richard Wade. So I had some idea how to go through the design process
for a piece of land, but planning and organising a project, that was a
different matter all together. Where to start?

I met a Sudanese business-man in
Addis called Alimedin who helped me develop the project concept and write the
initial proposals, get an investment licence etc. I wanted to set up a
community oriented Permaculture business that would not rely on exterior
funding. We decided it would be an Eco Lodge, so it could generate income while
hosting the country’s first PC demonstration site. We ended up doing it in
Konso, right down in the south 600km south of Addis Ababa. Without Alimedin’s
help in the early days I could never have got it off the ground. But once we
got the site and started working in the project he turned rogue. He took over
and wouldn’t let me have any input on the early design of the project and he
had no real concept of Permaculture at all. Within 3 month he had blown the
entire project budget and ran off, probably stealing a lot of the money as he went.
It was right at that point that my old school friend Peri came to the rescue.
He was coming over to hang out for a month and take a break from his job with
his cousin’s construction company. He ended up staying for a year and helping
me to advance the construction of the lodge to the point where we could almost
half feasibly open to accept guests. We wrote up a business plan, got the
garden going with the help of an English Permaculturalist-volunteer called Guy
Rees, and even managed to arrange for Rosemary Morrow to come and teach two
PDCs on the site in May and June 2008.

But by the end of that year,
though things were getting tight again... Peri had to go and get on with his
own life. The money, the bail-out which my parents had fronted when my own money
dried up, that is, was running out and I was soon going to be on my own again.
That was when Tichafa came in. I had been shouting it all over the internet
that we needed a Permaculture trainer to help us keep going in Konso. The
Australians weren’t responding and the British PC Association, who had earlier
found us Guy Rees couldn’t come up with anything. Finally though our call was
answered, from within Africa! Walter Nykia, the director of ReSCOPE, a Malawi
based organisation that operates Permaculture school-gardens around southern
Africa, recommended Tichafa Makovere, a Zimbabwean school teacher who had been
working on SCOPE and Schools Permaculture in Zimbabwe and around Southern
Africa for 14 years.

Tichafa came at just the right
time, November 2008. He helped us get eco-lodge formally opened and begin
operation. At the same time he took over running the demonstration site. We
announced for a PDC in January 2009, but we couldn’t find any international
participants. His name didn’t have the same ring as Rosemary Morrow, i guess,
but his work on the ground spoke for itself. We had to cancel the course, but
soon we had NGOs getting interested in what we were doing. I was running a
promotional campaign in Addis and I managed to get a private donor to fund us
to train some locals too. At the same time CISS, an Italian NGO, agreed that
they would put 3 local school teachers on our course in March.

In May the same year, a friend of
ours and consistent supporter of our work Sarah Davis, who had been a volunteer
and a participant on one of Rosemary’s courses in 2008 sent us some money train
more local teachers. At the same time Tichafa got Save the Children Finland on
board through his networking and they funded us to train 3 teachers. So we were
able to run 2 courses in the first part of 2009. The next stage was to begin
following up with school gardens in the teachers’ school compounds. And so the
Permaculture in Konso Schools Project was born.

The first school we implemented
in was Sagume Primary, from which the Italians had funded us to train one
teacher. The follow-up was based on a verbal agreement. Tichafa spent 3 days
leading the community implementation on the school site. However the NGO didn’t
live up to its verbal promise and the local offece staff refused to provide
Tichafa with the agreed sustenance or accommodation during the implementation
and refused to pay us a consultant’s fee after the garden was established. We
had effectively done the implementation ourselves, all be it as an infant
business desperately struggling to make ends meet. But at that stage was
critical in getting things going for the future. Save the children then came in
with two more school implementations at Fuchucha and Brokara. Next, in June
2010, Mercy Corps would bring in two more schools.

Around that time I was contacted
by a lawyer called Alison, in the UK, who offered to help us establish a
charity so that we could look for funding directly. A couple of friends of mine
as well as my dad and a few colleagues of his from London agreed to form the
board of the charity. By June 2010 we had registered the Ethiopia Permaculture
Foundation in the UK and held our first fundraiser at the Traveller’s Club in
London. By this time there were already eight schools in the PKSP. The eco-lodge
was by then quite well established as a business and Tichafa was looking to
spread his activities more widely than Konso. He established his own
consultancy business (Shumba Integrated Ecological Design) and handed back
management of the demonstration site to me in July when I returned to Ethiopia.
We had all this time been running PDCs and we were starting to get more
international participation. The EPF now funded us to give refresher courses to
two of the most promising teachers we had trained early on, and this brought
some great results. Asmelash Dagne the science teacher from Debena primary
school got really inspired at this point and went on to begin an impressive
implementation in his school with no further external financial support. Asmelash,
as the most promising of the teachers trained in Konso to date, has since been
acting as a translator in all subsequent trainings we have run, and looks set
to eventually develop into a trainer himself.

Around the beginning of 2011
things started getting interesting in Konso. We had a great crop of really
active interns who would stay with us for 3 months until March when we ran one
of our most successful PDCs to date. We were planning to run it together with
David Spicer from the PRI, but since we had not had many registrations early on
David cancelled as it looked like we would not be able to cover his travel
costs. Then we got a bunch of last-minute registrations, so in the end we had
eight or nine participants. The course was lead by Tichafa and I co-taught as an
assistant facilitator. One of the interns that participated was Eddie Joy, who
stayed for 6 months in total. He took charge of our tree planting scheme during
which we planned guilds of tree species and planted out over 12,000 tree
seedlings on our site between March and June 2011. We also trained a further
two teachers on that course funded by the EPF, taking the number of PKSP
participating schools to eight. Implementation on the school sites followed
immediately.

At that time Tichafa also began
working on a garden in Taitu Hotel in Addis Ababa, assisted by Tiginesh, a
graduate of one of our previous PDCs. The garden has now developed into an
impressive model set in one of the favourite haunts for back-packers and budget
travellers passing through the capital city. The hotel’s director, Mr Fitsum,
is pleased with the production of vegetables for the Hotel’s kitchen and the
garden is attracting attention to the cause.

Around the same time as this
Tichafa was made the director of Slow Food’s 1000 Gardens in Africa Project for
Ethiopia. Slow Food is an international organisation with its HQ in Italy. They
promote the quality and variety of traditional local foods as opposed to the
trashy commercial fast foods that are proliferating to dominate the modern diet,
while traditional processing and production of quality foods is being lost. But
their “1000 Gardens in Africa” project has more of a focus on food security and
they were really impressed by what they saw on the ground in Konso in our Schools
Project. They wanted to see the Permaculture in Schools Project expanded to the
whole Southern Region of Ethiopia and beyond. South Ethiopia has 65 ethnic
groups of which the Konso are just one. There would have to be wider coverage.
They have now agreed to establish 30 schools projects around the South. Tichafa
is in charge of it all.

All of this was, however, making
Tichafa extremely busy. My father, as a board member of the EPF has been
getting increasingly frustrated about inconsistent and sometimes poor reporting
back on the PKSP projects that the EPF has been funding. Tichafa, although his
groundwork is fantastic has been lacking a proper office and, with so much on
his plate, lacking the support staff needed to deliver reports on his work with
the school communities.

My father also felt that the
model for the schools project we were following lacked robustness. Training a
single or a pair of teachers from each school could produce good results but
only if the teachers were well motivated and pushed the project forwards. But
we learned that if we trained a lazy teacher the project would deliver a poor
outcome. We subsequently decided that with future PKSP schools we would train a
wider selection of the community: 2 teachers, 2 parents, 2 pupils – one male
and one female of each.

We began implementing this model
in July 2011, in a training lead by Steve Cran. The training and subsequent
implementation were funded by LUSH and the results were very encouraging. It
seems that training parents along with the teachers puts more pressure on them
to perform. And training pupils means that the concepts can be explained to the
other pupils in their own terms. We implemented the project in Gocha and Karat
Primary Schools and the projects have now been running for 3 months. The
results have been fantastic, and we will shortly post another update on these
two projects. We need to keep up the momentum on this.

We are really standing on a
foothill at this stage staring across a mountain range of possibilities. We are
scaling up and building on the hard won successes we have achieved so far. And
yet in a country of 80 million the possibilities are limitless. The EPF has now
agreed in principal to open a branch office inside the country. If this happens
we could be looking at branching out much wider into areas like wide-scale land
rehabilitation and agro-forestry funded through carbon credits schemes. Till
now we have been handicapped due to lack of a legal auspice through which the
EPF can work on the ground and apply for funding from bodies supporting
projects from inside the country. But if we are to successfully scale up we
need more support at this stage. It is very hard to find reliable and well
educated quality staff within the country. What we need to make this work at
this stage is enthusiastic and energetic young people who believe in the cause
of Permaculture and will help us progress it in Ethiopia. At the same time we
will keep working with promising locals and build them up to take over from us
in the long run. But so far we have been unable to find people we can really
give big responsibilities to confidently at this stage. The first thing we
really need is an office administrator who can help us with proposals and
reporting. We also need people to work on the ground for us. Strawberry Fields
and the demonstration site need to be kept going as we spread our activities
more widely. We are looking for an intern to help manage the farm and gardens
and we are also looking for a chef cook to manage the kitchen. Naturally these
two people have to coordinate closely between them, to minimise expenses and
maximise the use of what we grow/production of what we cook.

We plan to continue running
international PDCs at Strawberry Fields every 2 to 3 months, but we are also
now looking to establish a second training site more in the central highlands.
We are also planning to include a wider range of design examples from our
schools projects in other locations around the south of the country as well as
at Taitu Hotel in Addis Ababa. Our PDCs will become much more broad in the
scope of habitats and situations which the practical examples and illustrations
cover. We hope that students coming on the courses will be inspired to stay on
and help us out in different aspects of our work. Or maybe the other way round.
People without a background in Permaculture will come to help us and learn
about it by doing so.

For want of a better phrase, we
are making a call to arms here. Ethiopian Permaculture needs You! We need young
and passionate interns to come and assist us in this quest. Are you or someone
you know looking to gain more experience in any of these areas?

Please let me know if you are
interested or would like more information.

Comments (3)

You must be logged in to comment.

Cris Biemond
:
Tenastellin Wondemin,
Wow what a great and ethausiastic writing, its very late here so i will write you a larger reply later. just wanna say i am taking permaculture class in Holland from thursday on and my dream is to have a farm in tigray Ethiopia on the basis of permaculture.

Lots of love
Cris aka Kiros

Posted about 6 years ago

Report Cris Biemond on Permaculture in Ethiopia: A Call to Participate!

Cris Biemond
:
Tenastellin Wondemin,
Wow what a great and ethausiastic writing, its very late here so i will write you a larger reply later. just wanna say i am taking permaculture class in Holland from thursday on and my dream is to have a farm in tigray Ethiopia on the basis of permaculture.

Lots of love
Cris aka Kiros

Posted about 6 years ago

Report Cris Biemond on Permaculture in Ethiopia: A Call to Participate!

Joannah Stutchbury
:
Hi,
My name is Jo and I live in Kenya and have done two PDCs in the last year and a bit and am very keen to get more hands on experience. Are you still looking for assistants? I look forward to hearing from you. Jo

Posted about 5 years ago

Report Joannah Stutchbury on Permaculture in Ethiopia: A Call to Participate!